Life in the Cloud

Why is it so damn hard to find a nice convenient place to store my files online? Since the loss of my photos I figure the logical thing to do from now on is just keep my whole iPhoto library in a folder which is sync’ed to online storage. So I investigated a few of the main players and made some notes…

• Apple iCloud
  • Given that it’s iPhoto I want to back up, you’d think this would be in the running, but:
  • Offers no generally useful storage options (ie no folder sync)
  • Deletes items in your photo stream after 30 days.
  • Confusing as hell app-centric document storage, eg from Preview.app you can save a PDF “to the cloud”, but good luck finding that sucker in any other application or OS.
• Google Drive
  • Flaky client that constantly fails while syncing and doesn’t resume until you quit and restart.
  • Hogs network while syncing.
  • Arbitrary undocumented limitations on individual file size and who-knows-what else.
  • Tried to add my iPhoto library (~ 1GB) and the thing just keeps choking without giving me any useful error info.
• Amazon Cloud Drive
  • Should be great, since most other companies use Amazon storage for their back-end anyway, but…
  • I wouldn’t know, because the client requires Java to run, and that’s just bullshit. It’s file syncing, not computer science from the late 90s for chrissakes. Even the summer intern who wrote Google’s Drive client on a Friday afternoon didn’t need to resort to Java.
  • Everything Amazon touches is just ugly. I think Jeff Bezos is secretly their chief graphic designer, and that before being CEO of Amazon he designed the crawler graphics for television shopping channels.
  • Ok, I tried it anyway, and it got stuck just like Google Drive, and then when I quit it, emptied the folder on both client and server side, and then restarted, it got stuck trying to sync an empty folder with an empty folder. Brilliant.
• Microsoft Skydrive
  • Hey wait a sec… this one might not actually suck!
  • 7GB free!
  • Tidy OS X install…
  • Oh wait, it’s hung already, with only 7 files of about 8,000 uploaded.
  • I give up.
• Dropbox
  • Ok, it actually works, but…
  • Piddling 2GB free plan.
  • Upgraded plans cost more per GB than everyone else’s.
  • When someone shares a large dropbox file with you it takes up space in your account, even though they’re already paying for the storage.
  • Dropbox had a major security SNAFU a while back which demonstrated that their encryption was a total joke, and that alone should have killed the company.

So, Dropbox it is, because it’s the only one that even did what I needed it to do in the end. But honestly, how hard can it be to write a native client that synchronises files between local and online storage? It’s just the storing of bytes; no parsing or conversion required. Too hard for Google, Amazon and Microsoft, apparently. Microsoft and Amazon can’t even get their folder icons to properly match the appearance of OS X ones.

Thanks for nothing, iCloud

On Saturday the older of my two iMacs started beach-balling for 15 seconds at a time every minute or so, making it impossible to use. Many restarts and disk scans later (that goddamn startup “chooooo!” haunts my dreams) it looked like the internal hard drive was crapping out, and since all my important files are stored externally or online I figured I might as well wipe the drive and try a reinstall.

Although the 2009 model iMac doesn’t seem to have firmware level recovery support, I had an external OS X HD which let me boot off it and run disk tools etc. So after a bit of doinking around I had a fresh OS X install on a newly empty drive.

And of course it was then I remembered that all my files were backed up elsewhere… except for my photos. I had been storing them in iPhoto, on the drive I just nuked. I had a Time Machine backup of the drive at some point, but in the hardware shuffle when I got the new iMac I think I recycled that drive too. Because I was expecting to ultimately transfer everything to the new machine I’ve been treating the old one as secondary… But, largely because I’ve been using the new one exclusively for Windows development, I never got around to transferring my photo library.

This is why you should never make the decision to format your hard drive at 2AM.

So, unless I discover a backup disk I’d previously forgotten about, I realised the only photos that would survive would be those in my iCloud photo stream. I set up photo stream sync on the fresh iPhoto install, thinking that 1000 photos were better than none.

And iPhoto downloaded about 60, and that was it. Turns out iCloud only keeps your last 30 days of photos. Maximum 1000 photos, maximum 30 days.

Seriously iCloud, fuck you.

But before I totally despair, I look on my iPhone I see that my stream has 1000 photos in it. How can that be? Well I guess it’s something to do with the confusing way that photo stream is implemented, and although the older photos get discarded from online storage, any that were synced with the device stay cached locally (but then why the 1000 limit? Again, fuck you, iCloud). Checking my iPad I note it only has about half the photos that are on my iPhone, even though I’ve had the iPad for longer. At this point this is just another WTF in the grand scheme of Apple’s horrendously awful online services.

Ok, so now I just gotta save those photos from my iPhone since it’s the only place they exist right now. Here’s the convenient several-hundred-click method to do that:

1. Open your photo stream on your iOS device
2. Click Edit button.
3. Individually select every single goddamn photo you want to keep, because there ain’t no “Select All”. Get tappin’!
4. Save to new album
5. Photos will now be visible/downloadable in iPhoto when you connect your device.

iCloud is all, like “keep your docs in the cloud, it’s great!” and yet the only document type I could really use their cloud for, photos, gets fucking deleted after 30 days. I don’t use iCloud to store anything else because Apple went with this moronic app-centric storage model (instead of doc-centric) which makes it virtually useless for general storage.

Still Alive

Well this is probably the longest I’ve gone without posting– my poor blog has seen better times.

I’ve been quite busy lately, with work and also with the whole home-buying endeavour. We are so close, with almost everything sorted, but now we’re looking at all the stuff that got noted on the building report we just got back and scrambling to work out just what the “normal” level of money-pitty-ness is when buying a house. Oh and BTW there were termites at some stage! But everyone is saying that’s pretty normal and as long as they were dealt with properly it’s probably fine. Probably. Wheeeee! Basically this whole area is like a giant termite mound so what can we expect?

Been a while since I had this awful panic feeling deep in my gut, and not liking it at all. But maybe this is all normal, and we are just overreacting. Haha silly us.

I would really like a building report to have one page and look something like this:

Building Report

☐ Buy house.

☐ Do not buy house.

I would also really like it if the law here was that the vendor must provide an accredited report, rather than having to pay for one ourselves and discover these things just as we’re about to get locked in to a mortgage.

When I go to the property tomorrow to discuss our concerns it will only be the second time I have entered the premises. I spend more hands-on time shopping for a TV or an iPad than we have with this house. It seems crazy that this is how things are done.

GMail Feature Request

Like a lot of people (I imagine) I currently have two gmail accounts, one personal, and one for work (through Google Apps). But much to my extreme frustration there seems to be no way of merging them into a combined view so I don’t have to jump between browser tabs. The closest I came was to have my personal gmail check my work gmail as though it were just another external POP account. Which really is a terrible solution, as a) it only checks POP accounts once an hour, b) it means I am actually ending up with the same messages in 2 places, and c) if I reply to a work email from my personal account the recipient gets mail headers along the lines of “sent by mark@gmail.com on behalf of mark@company.com”. YUCK.

And so I find myself using Apple’s desktop Mail.app for the first time. And I really don’t like it (in fact I don’t even like the idea of desktop mail clients anymore). But at least it lets me combine multiple accounts (using IMAP instead of POP!) and view them in a unified inbox. Unfortunately, even though it’s IMAP based it’s still too thick to offer me the same convenience for my Sent folder, instead only showing items that have been sent via the desktop mail client itself.

As well as in Gmail, support for multiple account view would be great in Google’s calendar, contacts etc. It’s dumb that pretty much ALL my data is stored by Google and yet only third party clients can let me view these accounts simultaneously.

UPDATE: I tried setting up Outlook 2011 for Mac to see if it was better than Apple Mail. I got as far as getting frustrated with an account that looked like it was working and yet downloading zero messages, as well as the realization that built-in support for CalDAV and CardDAV seems to be missing (or incredibly well hidden), so screw that.

Consent is not that hard

A nice reality-check for anyone tempted to excuse sexual harassment or assault on the grounds of situational complexity, cultural misunderstandings, natural urges, difficulty in parsing non-verbal cues, victim’s choice of clothing etc… What if a person applied the same lack of judgement and consideration in other areas of everyday life? The following are excerpted from: If Consent Was Really That Hard, Whiny Dudes Would Fail At Every Aspect of Life:

• First of all, they’d all be in jail anyway for repeated trespassing. This would happen after they tried to get jobs by walking into  workplaces uninvited, putting themselves at a workstation, and demanding a paycheck. They would, of course, be told that they’re trespassing by the bewildered people in the workplace, and they’d reply, “But I work here. I have this job.” And when they were told that no, they have to apply first and be hired, they’d throw a temper tantrum and refuse to leave, saying, “You advertised a job opening! The job is clearly mine!” until the cops came by and cuffed them and threw them back into jail. Rinse, repeat, because making sure you’re hired before you get a job is HAAAAARRRRD.
• Driving a car, of course, would be completely unmanageable. They’d always be getting into car wrecks every time they drove more than a block, because right-of-way would make no sense to them. Imagine trying to merge into traffic if you can’t handle the process of “reading” another car’s “body language” to see if it’s letting you into traffic. Because this doesn’t happen to them, we can safely assume they can read car body language, so their claims to be unable to read women’s body language are simply put, lies.
• Not to mention the routine damage to their bodies from constant animal attacks, because they don’t understand how to tell a friendly animal who wants petting from a snarling animal that will bite. But, in reality, they can understand animal body language, even as they claim to be unable to understand their fellow human beings who they can converse with in a spoken language.